That seems like a great idea for a community. My only concern would be about distro-specific things. When you talk about "switching to Linux", you're really talking about "switching to the Linux kernel with about 1500 additional packages that form your actual experience". The flexibility is the best part, but i know it can be daunting for the new user.

This is also where we get a lot of distribution fights and pedantic arguments - there's a lot of ways to do things, and folks love to argue for their preferred method. What complicates things further is that the nuances are both important and irrelevant. There's atomic vs traditional, deb vs rpm (and the seemingly hundreds of package managers), systemv vs systemd, gnome vs KDE, X vs Wayland, and even recently lutris vs heroic vs faugus, and each of those is fine to use but will force you to do things a specific way that could make certain edge cases difficult or impossible to manage.

Honestly, I'd love to see a comm like this, and I'd love to contribute, but it would be to be pretty heavily moderated to avoid a lot of the pointless arguments that would derail the conversions

Congrats, and welcome to the community!

For real. It's a ton of fun when you have a Linux server presenting a SMB share and you get a folder called MyFolder and one called MYFOLDER. Take a guess about what happens in that situation. I guarantee it's different

Spotify shuffle has been awful for a very long time. I've had the same experience more times than I can count (shuffling the Playlist gives you the same order for the first 10-20 songs). I've also noticed in my case that if I have a very long Playlist (like 300+ songs), I never hear anything but the same 70 or so. I have my theories but I can't prove anything

I'll toss in Empire Records - the store set, the costumes, the music, the actors, the meandering listlessness... all scream "this is a 90's movie about the 90's". Plus the whole Rex Manning plot is absolutely what happened to so many 70's and 80's artists. Not perfect by any means, but a great encapsulation of the decade.

Usenet never really went away, it just got quieter in favor of easier to use options. I still use it pretty frequently for the couple of things is really good for.

It's a gross oversimplification, but think of usenet as a kind of early social media or proto-forums. Before websites, facebook, or anything resembling the modern internet took off, news groups were howl ike-minded people connected. You could post articles to various groups, sort of like a dead drop, and that post would be related around to all of the various providers based on who subscribed to whom. The user interface was very similar to an email client and you could look at it like sending email to a global address (with no user@ part)

The structure of usenet was based on dot syntax, with the topic scope becoming progressively more narrow as you went along. You would have things like: alt.books.scifi

alt.books.scifi.authors

alt.books.scifi.authors.asimov

or comp.software

comp.software.unix

comp.software.unix.compilers

with each of those groups focusing on more specific topics as they went down the hierarchy, and thousands of groups and subgroups.

Usenet was one of the first federated services, too. Due to how replication was managed, no one single server or host controlled it. Your server could go down, but any other server that replicated (federated) with your instance would have all the same articles unless they were marked as a "local only" group.

This is all very early in the internet, but i feel like this is the kind of thing that will save us in the end. Federated services, newsgroups, personal websites, and forums can free us from the shackles of Corp owned platforms. It's amazing how relevant it still is for a technology spun up in the early 80s. Wikipedia has a great article on usenet that everyone on a fediverse platform should read to help understand how we got here and how quirky and weird and fun the old internet used to be (and hopefully can be again)

The biggest thing to remember here is that sending FROM your linux.com vanity address probably won't work well. Yes, you absolutely can set your "mail from:" address to anything you want, but without corresponding SPF or DKIM records in the linux.com DNS server (which you can't control and they won't do), most major email providers will either send your messages to spam or outright reject them.

One of the most iconic bbq joints in one of the biggest bbq towns (Joe's KC, formerly known as Oklahoma Joe's) started in the back of a gas station and it's still there today

For your average desktop or server installation, this isn't big news. Where it matters a lot will be in embedded systems.

Olathe and OP are two big reasons we can't have anything nice here. The streetcar is staying on the Missouri side only (at least for now) so I'm hopeful it'll stay free.

I saw it explained best like this

Current imported price: $30

Current locally made price: $35

New imported price: $70

New locally made price: $69.99

The article you're looking for is in Dragon #62 - The half-orc point of view. There's a whole series of them and they're all good reads.

Still a long way until the end of November...

What you're looking for is anything labeled a "suite". I prefer to stay in those whenever possible, and generally use Staybridge, but there's other options out there

I see you've played knifey-spooney before...

Yeah but even when you do that, the shuffle is still garbage. What i think is happening is that they're loading the first X entries in the Playlist and passing that to the (bad) shuffle algorithm instead of passing the whole Playlist first. Then when it gets towards the end of X, it does the same thing with the next chunk. I can't imagine that it saves that much money but it tracks with both what I see and the general trends of enshitification

You can already do number 2 (with some restrictions). You have to set up your networking tab correctly, use blank passwords, and uncheck "allow remote connections" for the "local" accounts. i have things set up so that external users are forced to log in and local users just pick a profile. If you also add your external users' IP addresses to the LAN Networks box, they'll be treated as an internal user too (though how you keep that up to date is a bit more challenging). It's not precisely the Netflix experience but it works well enough for us

You wildly underestimate most corporate IT security's obsession with pushing updates to products like this as soon as they release. They also often have the power to make such nonsense the law of the land, regardless of what best practices dictate. Maybe this incident will shed some light on how bad of an idea auto updates are and get C-levels to do something about it, but even if they do, it'll only last until the next time someone gets compromised by a flaw that was fixed in a dot-release

Doing the Lord's work. BrightScript seems to exist only as a way to torment those of lesser constitution.

As another KC resident, I'll second this sentiment.... there is nothing happening here worth the risk